9/11, JFK each shook the nation differently

Wednesday

Sep 11, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 11, 2013 at 10:19 AM

People of a certain age remember exactly where they were when they learned of two particular events of national trauma. But they tend to feel differently about them, at least in retrospect. We commemorate one of those events today.

Jeb Phillips, The Columbus Dispatch

People of a certain age remember exactly where they were when they learned of two particular events of national trauma.

But they tend to feel differently about them, at least in retrospect.

We commemorate one of those events today. Twelve years ago, Dwight Groce was listening to the morning news on the radio when he heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

He was in a Columbus schools office with others who coordinated the social-studies curriculum, and they heard about (and watched) the other crashes and the towers collapse as the day wore on.

“I was frightened about where this was going to go,” said Groce, of the Northwest Side, now 64. “ Where was it going to end?”

We will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the other event in November. Groce was 14 years old then, in sixth-period study hall at Walnut Ridge High School. The teacher announced that President John F. Kennedy had been shot.

That was a different kind of trauma, Groce said. “(Kennedy) was young. His family was young. It was just shock. It was the grieving process.”

Over and over, people who remember Sept. 11, 2001, and Nov. 22, 1963, describe their emotions that way. People felt a kind of national fear 12 years ago. But they felt a personal sadness in 1963.

David Steigerwald, a history professor at Ohio State University who focuses on the 20th century, said he has tried to think of the two events together as “episodes in public mourning.” Ultimately, though, they’re different.

“I’m not sure grief is the right word to describe the aftermath of 9/11; shock, trauma, anger strike me as more accurate,” he wrote in an email to The Dispatch. “ Grief does work for JFK, though.”

There was a brief period after Kennedy’s assassination when people worried that his death was part of a communist attack; the public understood the tragedy in the framework it knew, the one of the Cold War, said Steven Conn, a professor and the director of the public-history program at Ohio State.

When that initial fear passed, though, people thought about sorrow, about a person lost. On Sept. 11, people thought about the future and about what threats might come.

“The Kennedy assassination is really important for people of that generation,” Conn said. “I do think that Sept. 11, that legacy, is going to continue in ways that are significant for the next generation.”

Retired Air National Guard Maj. Gen. Miles Durfey, now 82, was in a real-estate company office in Springfield when he heard about Kennedy. He knew what a real communist threat was — he had been activated for the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He knew this wasn’t that.

What hit him in 1963 was little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin. Durfey had lost his own father not long before. He thought about the Kennedys in terms of his own family.

Durfey thought about Sept. 11 as a lifelong military man. The country had been attacked.

“It’s just different symbolism,” he said.

That’s true for most people. But Cathy Nelson, 61, of the Far East Side, sees it another way. She was Groce’s colleague in 2001 and heard the news about the first plane on his radio. Her daughter was in middle school, and she called to see if school was going to let out early. School leaders thought it was safer to keep the children in class.

Nelson felt fear, as did most everyone else.

In 1963, Nelson was in middle school herself. She remembers weeping and seeing teachers weeping. School let out early.

Nelson, who is black, knew that her grandparents thought that Kennedy was a friend to their race. She heard her grandfather say after the assassination, “Colored folks are going to be in really big trouble now.”

The way that Nelson thought then, that might mean people could be hurt the way Kennedy was.

She was young then, of course. But when she thinks of 1963, and of 2001, they feel alike.